Teacher Researcher Partnerships

This blog series, under the direction of Dr. Carol Connor, presents research on problems and actionable solutions for diverse classrooms and learners. The editorial team consists of doctoral students in the iSi lab: Elham Zargar, Karen Taylor, Taffeta Wood, and Masha Jones.

Teacher Researcher Partnerships: Let’s Fix This

What Needs to Be Fixed

Teachers and Researchers share common goals and common problems. One area of concern for both is elementary school students’ literacy. According to NAEP, only 36% of U.S. students are performing at or above a proficient level of reading by fourth grade. This is especially concerning given that students who struggle with reading are more likely to experience long-term negative consequences including limited employment opportunities and higher rates of incarceration (National Center for Education Statistics, 2009). Many students fail to attain proficient literacy skills because they do not receive the type and amount of instruction needed to meet their potential. One size does not fit all, especially for literacy instruction (Connor et al., 2009; Taylor, Roehrig, Hensler, Connor, & Schatscheneider, 2010). Educational researchers know that our labs are full of solutions and our schools are filled with challenges. Teachers know that their jobs are important and often difficult. So let’s consider how we can solve the problems of student failure by closing another important achievement gap: the gap between research and classroom practice. Through successful teacher-researcher partnerships, we may hope to take what we know and change the way things that are not being learned, are taught. Here we will look at this kind of possibility in the context of a reflection on a particular research-school partnership from 2015-2016. I came to this study as a new researcher. Being fresh from my former position as a first grade classroom teacher in a title one school, I had an interesting first-hand look at how researchers look at teachers, and how teachers look back.

Why Isn’t This Fixed Yet?

I can vouch for the fact that even schools with challenges are full of people who care a lot. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always mean much for the children the teachers are responsible for teaching. That is to say, if caring alone solved the literacy crisis in the United States our teachers could solve it in one of the many weekends they spend working and planning. But teaching and learning turns out to be a complicated endeavor that you can’t just feel your way through. Best practice, not longer hours of blood sweat and tears, are what we need in schools. This is why education research focuses, not just on understanding students or teachers or schools, but also on interventions and finding out how student learning can be maximized. We don’t want to just ring our hands about problems or blame parents and students; we want to our students to succeed. This won’t happen unless change happens in classrooms. In order to take what research knows and implement it in our schools, I propose that what we need to do is to strategically plan, do, study, and act in schools where change is needed and our presence is welcome. (Yes, this is a PDSA cycle of improvement science, which, I will expand upon a bit more later.) But if you simply can’t wait; visit the Carnegie Foundation.

So What Does This Look Like?

As a researcher I worked on a large-scale efficacy trial of a web-based technology called A2i (Assessment to instruction). A2i is a support technology for teachers to help them personalize literacy instruction to maximize students’ learning. It uses patented algorithms to give teachers the amounts and types of literacy instruction each of their students needs. For example, some students need more work on code-focused learning like phonics, and some students need more help with meaning-focused learning like comprehension. We knew from nine years of previous studies that A2i worked to ensure students literacy gains when teachers used the technology to plan personalized instruction. You can see more about A2i here. Within a Design Based Implementation Research (DBIR) framework, we worked with schools to develop the A2i technology, the recommendations, the assessments and the professional development (PD) in an iterative process. Like all partnerships, our DBIR partnership had its own unique joys and sorrows. To better understand DBIR you can visit this site.

One of the joys, as any scientist will tell you, is that our hypothesis was supported (what we thought would happened did indeed). We found that our professional development (PD) mattered. That is, teachers who rated higher in PD “take up”— (or buy-in including teacher participation in PD, teacher’s comfort with technology, teacher’s willingness to schedule in class PD, teacher’s willingness to meet one-on-one with researchers for support, teacher’s willingness to learn how to use A2i) used A2i more. In turn, students whose teachers used A2i for more time generally made bigger literacy gains. One of the things we know from our previous studies is that the more teachers used A2i, the more they individualized (or personalized) instruction in the classroom.

Practice What You Preach

That’s all very well and good; the question, however, is how do we take this information, study it and act with other schools to improve the teacher take-up? How do we bridge the gap between research and practice in schools? How do we just… fix it? Yes, teachers who had better PD take-up used A2i more but, knowing that PD and PD take-up matter, how do we get more reluctant teachers to engage and act?

This is where I would like to go back to the idea of improvement science. You’ll notice that I am talking about both DBIR and improvement science in the same blog. I do so purposefully for two reasons. 1) Because they are both useful and, just as teachers and researchers, they have similar goals and challenges. So let’s all just get along, shall we? Somebody think of the children! And 2) No framework has all the answers and it may behoove both practitioners (teachers) and researchers to remember that the answers to complex challenges may be to use a combination the most effective methods and approaches.

In the improvement science framework of getting better at getting better, let us plan, do, study and act. As we partner with schools we should consider which teachers had better take up and which didn’t. In studying our results, I can see that we had some teachers that had issues with A2i’s recommendations for their students. We had other teachers who simply felt overwhelmed with the district’s various demands on their time and with reaching those goals. The problem here is not realizing that our common goal is their common goal: children’s literacy. And this, this is a lesson from the DBIR framework, commitment to a common goal.

Can You Give Me An Example?

Let’s look at what happened in a particular case. One teacher, who refused to use A2i during months of district testing, makes me wonder, might her students have done better on the state tests if she were personalizing literacy instruction daily in order to better ensure student literacy growth? I propose that, yes, indeed, this would have helped her students. Although we pointed this out to her on various occasions, she was absolutely certain that our way to the goal was not as good as her way to the goal. Remember that as researchers, our partners can refuse and/or withdraw during the course of a study. We must walk the fine line of advocacy for students that are not ultimately ours, and respect for the interventions we know will serve those students. So perhaps the lesson from this teacher is that we needed to provide her with better irrefutable evidence that the A2i and personalizing instruction would, and was working, for her particular students, and that the skills that the recommended learning opportunities would improve would align to her district tests. This proved difficult as she was barely using the ISI framework or A2i, and did not want us in her room. Clearly, we don’t want to be stymied like this in future. So how do we take this and study it in order to act. Reflecting with this teacher herself makes sense. I would like to interview her and really get a picture of what it would have taken to convince her. Perhaps if we could have run small groups in her room and shown her the growth of her students when they were receiving personalized literacy instruction that matched the A2i’s personalizing literacy instruction recommendations she could have been convinced. But we could not get her consent to run groups. To get there, it’s possible that demonstrating our appreciation of her challenges through a research partnership event at our university to kick the year off. Even though we had the support of the principal, the take-away here is, take care of your relationships with a teachers and educational leaders, provide as much evidence as you can, and ask, ask, ask what teachers are thinking/feeling/not believing and work to close that gap.

In order to solve our problem: the literacy gap and the gap of research to practitioner implementation, I propose that we work within both DBIR and Improvement Science frameworks in order to:

Have a committed team in the spirit of DBIR (Let’s remember that we all set out on this path for the same reason (Fishman, et al, 2009) and this same reason is students’ academic achievement.

Deliver a real solution (Because, they won’t do what we are asking if they think we are asking them to not get to the goal — Children’s literacy) In this case we surely had a program that works when implemented (Connor et al., 2009).

Design iteratively and as a partner with schools as DBIR recommends and use the improvement science cycle of plan, do, study and act (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, & LeMahieu, 2015) to more accurately define our plan of action and where we are in the process in order to get better at getting better more efficiently and purposefully in order to effect change and in the spirit of DBIR, produce original analysis.

Outlining these recommendations, I find myself re-reading them and asking myself: To what extend did we do these things, and how can we better follow these recommendations with A2i in the future, as it rolls out as a product through a social benefit corporation [hyperlink (learningovations.com)]? That is, as we move from research to even larger scale implementation, how do we continue to close the gap of what research knows is best practice and business as usual in literacy classrooms? We had a committed research team and we had, for the most part committed teachers, but in future we need to all understand how the common goal of literacy for all students can best be met. The real solution will be teachers using research-based solutions. Finally, in classrooms where researchers are working with teachers, we must push ourselves to be constantly planning, doing, studying and acting in a cycle that quickly makes note of issues, outcomes, and changes that must be swiftly made to create a cohesive team of teachers and researchers. The role of researcher is both expert and support staff, with teachers at the center as co-experts. Still, we must better inform and illustrate for teachers the benefits of our research and their real world applications for their students. By doing so, we can move as partners towards closing the many gaps that remain when we look at each other from different sides.